image: Woodland agrimony is a rare and threatened plant and in New York state. view more
Credit: Victoria Nuzzo
ITHACA, NY -- Woodland agrimony isn't much to look at--the short plant with jagged leaves and tiny yellow flowers is likely to be overlooked on an afternoon hike -- but this rare, threatened plant got a high-tech hand from researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI).
BTI scientist Joyce Van Eck and research assistant Patricia Keen developed a test tube tissue culture procedure that multiplies the plant's numbers, which they detailed in the journal Native Plants. They collaborated with Victoria Nuzzo, an ecologist and the founder of the company Natural Area Consultants, who transferred the lab-cultured plants to forests in New York state to study why this threatened species is in decline.
Nuzzo, and her colleagues Bernd Blossey, associate professor in Cornell University's Department of Natural Resources, and Andrea Dávalos, a research associate in his lab, reached out to Van Eck to see if she could help them with a research quandary.
"We were looking at the impacts of different stressors on native plants and particularly on four rare native plants in the northern U.S., and needed seeds and seedlings of each species for our experiments." said Nuzzo. "One of the rare plants we worked with was woodland agrimony. We found a single population and we simply couldn't collect enough seeds to use in our experiments, or to grow seedlings to transplant."
Van Eck and Keen began developing a procedure to propagate the plant, starting with common agrimony and then switching to the threatened woodland agrimony once they had worked out the details.
The first -- and most troublesome -- step was cleaning the plant segments used to start the in vitro multiplication process to remove contamination. Bacteria and fungi can take over a culture and kill the plants, while insects hatched from attached eggs can spread microbes from culture to culture. The agrimony proved especially difficult to decontaminate.
"We really struggled trying to get material that was clean for tissue culture. We tried all sorts of things," said Van Eck. "There's a fine line sometimes between getting rid of the contaminants and the plant," she laughed.
Ultimately, Keen overcame the contamination issue through a strenuous washing protocol including soap, alcohol, bleach and miconazole, an anti-fungal compound found in athlete's foot treatments, which she also added to the culture medium.
Keen cut apart the shoots every four weeks to make new plantlets -- much like the magical broomstick in the movie Fantasia that forms new brooms when the original is cut into pieces -- and cultivated them in test tubes containing salts, nutrients and growth regulators that encouraged root and shoot growth. The plantlets grew "true-to-type," meaning that they looked just like the original material. After a stay in the greenhouse to harden up, the researchers transplanted the agrimony into the forest field sites.
In six months, Keen had generated 1013 plants from a starting population of just 35.
"I think the tissue culture option is something people in the conservation field should consider, if they aren't already," said Van Eck. "When you have limited plant material and need a way to bulk up the numbers, tissue culture is a great way to do that."
Nuzzo and her colleagues planted the agrimony at 12 field sites where they could observe and control the effects of slugs, deer, earthworms, invasive plants and other environmental factors. Though interactions between different stressors are complex, grazing deer appear to be an important factor contributing to the decline of the remaining woodland agrimony populations.
Currently, there are no wide-scale agrimony replanting efforts in the works, but the study shows that replenishing the population through tissue culture is a viable option.
While Van Eck and Keen's role in the project is over, their test tube plants live on. In many of the test locations, the woodland agrimony is reproducing the old-fashioned way and establishing new populations.
###
To learn more about Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) research, visit the BTI website at http://bti.cornell.edu.
Connect online with BTI at http://www.facebook.com/BoyceThompsonInstitute and http://www.twitter.com/BTIScience.
About Boyce Thompson Institute
Boyce Thompson Institute is a premier life sciences research institution located in Ithaca, New York on the Cornell University campus. BTI scientists conduct investigations into fundamental plant and life sciences research with the goals of increasing food security, improving environmental sustainability in agriculture and making basic discoveries that will enhance human health.
BTI employs 150 staff, with scientists from 40 countries around the world and has twice been named as one of the Best Companies in New York State. Its 15 principal investigators are leading minds in plant development, chemical ecology, microbiology and plant pathology, and have access to the institute's state-of-the-art greenhouse facilities with computerized controls and a system of integrated pest management. BTI has one of the largest concentrations of plant bioinformaticists in the U.S., with researchers who work across the entire spectrum of "omics" fields. BTI researchers consistently receive funding from NSF, NIH, USDA and DOE and publish in top tier journals. Throughout its work, BTI is committed to inspiring and educating students and to providing advanced training for the next generation of scientists. For more information, visit http://www.bti.cornell.edu.
Journal
Native Plants Journal